A. CAVALLARO: (MIS)PERCEPTIONS OF TSAR IVAN IV WINNER OF THE 2016 HOFFMAN PRIZE: WESTERN (MIS)PERCEPTIONS OF TSAR IVAN IV VASILYEVICH THE “TERRIBLE”: DEPICTIONS OF IVAN IV’S REIGN BY WESTERN WRITERS FROM THE 16th TO THE 21st CENTURY ALONGSIDE 16th-CENTURY WORKS OF WESTERN EUROPEAN POLITICAL THOUGHT Author: Albert C. Cavallaro Faculty Sponsor: Rachel Goldman, Department of History ABSTRACT This paper examines the depictions of Ivan IV Vasilyevich the “Terrible” by his 16th century Western European coevals and modern western historians, while simultaneously situating Ivan’s reign in the broader discourse of Western European political thought occurring during his lifetime. Utilizing a variety of sources, including: written reports from English travelers in the 16th century; a letter from King Sigismund of Poland to Elizabeth I in 1559; and Niccolō Machiavelli’s The Prince, this paper shows how the written vilifications of Ivan are more a result of a long Western European tradition of “othering” Russian culture, and a reaction to Ivan’s pursuit, and commencement, of the Livonian War, rather than being due to Ivan’s actions exhibiting any significant divergence from that of contemporaneous Western European political thought. This paper is envisioned as an accompaniment and enlargement of the debate started by Ivan the Terrible: Profiles in Power, which shows Ivan’s actions as being a product of the religious and political thought predominate in Muscovy during the 16th century. INTRODUCTION The reign of the Muscovite Tsar Ivan IV Vasilyevich, commonly known by the persistent English mistranslation of his epithet Groznyi as “Terrible”, from 1547 to 1584 was immensely productive. Domestically, the tsar “issued a new law code, regulated and routinized military service, reformed procedures for taxation and local administration… built a system of state chancelleries staffed by full-time clerks”1 and ordered “the first attempts to create a large-scale general map of Muscovy in its entirety”2; while, concurrently, engaging in the successful military expansion into, and subsequent conquering of, the Khanates of Kazan in 15523, and Astrakhan in 1556: both 16th century remnants of Batu’s Golden Horde, also known as the Kipchak Khanate, which conquered the embryonic Russian state of Kievan Rus’4 in 1240 and instituted a following period of Mongol dominion in the area that lasted until 14805. However, not all of Ivan’s exhibitions of bellicosity were greeted with success, with the twenty-five year long Livonian War, fought from 1558 to 1583 and engaging the Livonian Order, Denmark, Sweden and Poland-Lithuania in opposition to Muscovy, attesting to this. Despite an initial string of military victories in the early years, the Livonian War ultimately served only as a tax on Muscovite financial reserves and lives without resulting in any new territorial acquisitions or the supposed desideratum of achieving direct access to the Baltic Sea to develop overseas trade6. The Muscovite conquest of the Khanate of Sibir, and the corresponding expansion into the western Siberia, also began in the latter half of Ivan’s reign, although this was more due to the private ventures of the Stroganov family and their famed employee, the Cossack adventurer Ermak, rather than a result of any specific policy of Ivan’s. 1 TCNJ JOURNAL OF STUDENT SCHOLARSHIP VOLUME XVIII APRIL 2016 OPRICHNINA AND ZEMSHCHINA Despite these sundry events of Ivan’s reign, it is his institution of the oprichnina, 1565-72, that dominates depictions of his rule by both his 16th century Western European coevals, and modern western historians. It was during this time when Ivan divided up his realm into two halves, the oprichnina and zemshchina7, that he concurrently assumed the power to “initiate treason trials at his own discretion, pass sentence himself, and determine the level of punishment,”8 and created the “special corps of oprichniki, who constituted the tsar’s personal bodyguard.”9 It was these nobles of the oprichniki, who were allowed to remain in territories of the oprichnina, that Ivan utilized in the investigation and prosecution of his perceived enemies. Correspondingly, the years 1565-1572 were characterized both by Ivan’s increased use of political repression, involving the torturing and executing of numerous prominent boyars, as well as the forcible mass land resettlement of zemschina nobles from lands incorporated into the oprichnina; this generally involving a transition from hereditary estates to service tenure lands. The 16th century focus on the oprichnina belies an attempt to portray Ivan as an overly and uniquely malevolent figure distinct from his Western European contemporaries. Despite a Russian folklore tradition in which Ivan’s image is generally a sympathetic one10 as well as the known admiration of the later Russian tsar Peter the Great11, whom western historians have looked significantly kinder on, this negative perception of Ivan as a sovereign malefactor and belief in his supposed distinction from that of his contemporaries has been largely maintained in modern historical works. Implicit in this process is the habitual translation of the tsar’s appellation Groznyi as “Terrible” coloring his subsequent depiction; “Grozyni” is a far more ambiguous and positive term than this repeated English translation suggests, denoting “a complex and largely positive mixture of severity and awesome might, especially in battle.” 12 A monarchical sobriquet of this sort was not a uniquely Russian occurrence as European monarchs in the 16th century were “praised for inspiring a combination of fear, admiration, and love in their subjects.”13 Edmund Spenser’s addressing of Queen Elizabeth I as “O dredd soverayne”14 in Book Three15 of the Faerie Queene, published in 1590 six years after Ivan’s death, indicates the non- peculiarity of this phenomenon. This process of distinction is further evidenced in the current fashion of taking a psychoanalytic approach to Ivan’s reign: this generally involving the casting of unflattering aspersions onto the state of Ivan’s sanity during his rule. IVAN AND THE WEST This belief in Ivan’s political and moral divergence from his Western European contemporaries, supposedly occurring due to the political repression pursued during the oprichnina period, lacks a historical basis in reality. While acknowledging that Europe was not a homogenous cultural entity during Ivan’s reign, nor in the centuries preceding and following it, it is notable that the actions Ivan engaged in and the policies he endorsed during his reign possessed significant parallels with the writings of Western European political thinkers ranging from Italy, England and France throughout the 16th to the early 18th century; therefore aligning Ivan rather firmly alongside the broader discourse of contemporaneous 16th century Western European political thought. Thus, Ivan should be seen as isomorphic to, rather than divergent from, the political thought of his Western European coevals. Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince published in 1532, and James I’s The True Law of Free Monarchies; or, The Reciprocal and Mutual Duty Betwixt a Free King and His Natural Subjects published in 1598 and 1601, both attest to this phenomenon; with Ivan’s actions becoming justified, if not explicitly endorsed, in these authors’ writings. Additionally, the writings of the French cleric Jacques-Benigne Bousset’s Politics drawn from the Very Words of Holy Scripture, published posthumously in 1709 after Bossuet’s death in 1704, indicates that Ivan’s reign and the actions followed therein continued to exert parallels with that of Western European political thought until, at least, the early 18th century. With this suggested divergence lacking substantiation, the 16th century Western European writers’ negative perception of Ivan is revealed as resulting not from any basis in 2 A. CAVALLARO: (MIS)PERCEPTIONS OF TSAR IVAN IV historical fact, but, instead, from a long-held Western European tradition of ‘othering” Russian people and culture, occurring mainly due to religious differences and corresponding animosity between the Catholic and Orthodox faiths, as well as the growth of Western European anxiety over the development of Muscovy as a military power under Ivan: an anxiety specifically exacerbated by Ivan’s pursuit of the Livonian War. The consistent failure of subsequent historians to examine and challenge the claims of this faux historical narrative has allowed this 16th century misconstruction of Ivan to be largely maintained to the present. Iurri Krizhanich, a Croatian pan-Slavist Catholic missionary who lived in the 17th century, noted a derogatory trend occurring in writings by Western Europeans concerning Russians in his Politika published in 1666. “In short, when these authors write anything about Russia or any other Slavic people they write not history, but biting satire. They exaggerate our vices, inadequacies, and natural shortcomings, and wherever there is no sin to be found, they invent one. They also write false histories.” 16 One writer specifically mentioned and condemned is Adam Olearius, who, in a 1647 publication, declared that Russians were “cruel and fit only for slavery.”17 This trend of hostility is likewise present in writings from the 16th century with Giles Fletcher, an English traveler who arrived in Muscovy in the late 1580’s during the reign of Ivan’s son Fedor, titling a chapter in his work Of the Russe Commonwealth “Of the doctrine of the Russe church, and what errors it holdeth.”18